So Google's Dropbox alternative, Drive, is in testing.
https://drive.google.com/start
I'm a paid Dropbox subscriber, but I tried this for a day. It wasn't as simple or intuitive as Dropbox, and I wasn't fond of Google's privacy policy over my creative and work stuff, whereas Dropbox's seems friendlier. Only reason I'd stick with it would be the pricing.
Have you guys tried it yet?? If so, what didya think?
Cute. Understandable but totally transparent at the same time. :)Google Drive is available for:
PC and Mac
iPhone and iPad (coming soon)
Android devices
Dropbox is totally screwed. It's 4x cheaper, and microsoft's identical version is like 10x cheaper. If I didn't already have an 18GB free dropbox, I'd certainly switch.
I betcha Dropbox will lower its prices as a result of all this. At least I hope they do.
Or they can add value somehow. Lowering prices is not a great strategy because you can't really raise them again later. It's a race to the bottom and you don't really win when you get there. :)
That privacy policy is a big worry. Is this the future of cloud services? If you use our service, we assume rights to use content in our service any way we see fit? That is tremendously shit and I wonder if it would even stand up if challenged, but I would not want it to be my content that is the test case.
Works fine for me. Privacy policy really should not be a worry. They are not going to sell your content to third parties; the policy is there so all the various different Google components can work together, and so they can make better ads and better searches. You may not be in favor of better ads, but it's not like some random advertiser is going to have access to your drive content, and that is after all how they will make their money on the vast majority of free accounts.
Believe me, back in the 90s I reviewed some of the major online advertiser practices -- the firms wanted to partner with us, so they were open with us. Those companies were just evil; they lied to the press and the government about what they were doing, and told a different story to their partners about what their real capabilities were with respect to shared cookies and databases of personal information and so on. I'm convinced that Google is vastly superior in terms of their commitment to reasonable use of the data they collect; superior to Facebook, too, for that matter.
I don't say Google are lily-white and perfect in all respects, but I think they are less likely than Dropbox to mess up and reveal the data to the world or to mess up and allow malware through their ports.
Concerns about Google Drives service terms are overblown. Lots of them are things Google actually needs to be able to provide the service, allow link generation, create machine translations, etc, and the others are easily avoided by simply not marking your files as public.
Yeah, true. Dropbox did just just add some nifty stuff, like sharing of any file easily, and their newly updated mobile app rocks.Originally Posted by WarrenM
I'm a Dropbox subscriber, and I'm tempted to switch over to Google Drive too. I'm actually not yet using half of my 50GB of Dropbox space, so I could drop from $9.99 a month with Dropbox to $2.49 with Google.
I'm trying it out by storing a few game projects on there first, to see how it compares. The reason I use Dropbox over other services is how easy and foolproof it is, particularly if I want to set it up for someone else and share a project folder with them. I haven't investigated yet to see how that works with Google.
It's possible I could just use Google for my own stuff, and my (expanded) free Dropbox account for stuff I want to share.
I have noticed that the tooltip when you hover over the icon in the system tray is less informative than the dropbox one.
Drive makes me wish I'd shelled out some cash for a space upgrade on the old Google Docs/Picasa services, because they're honoring the prices from back then. Apparently they were annual and much, much cheaper than the new pricing scheme that rolled out with Drive. . . something like $80/year for 200GB? I forget, but it was niiiiice. I just didn't see any utility in it before it was a general-purpose drive, and now that it is, they've made it more expensive :(
I tried to sign up but the web site said they would email me when they felt like letting me in. Thanks Google!
Warren, you'll likely get an invite within a day or two.
I'm playing around with it, and I'm still not sold. With Dropbox, it feels seamless, like I'm working with a local drive on any computer. GD feels...less seamless, maybe because I'm not used to it. I also wish I could open Google Spreadsheets in Excel rather than Google Docs, for example. I'd much rather use Word and Excel than Docs, honestly.
Meanwhile, I got a notice a few days ago from Microsoft saying "hey, we're going to be changing our terms but you've been around so long we'd like to give you a chance to grandfather in at 25G" for Skydrive.
Brian, check out Skydrive. (There are third-party clients that work with Android; there's an open API.) You get actual online versions of Word/Excel/Onenote/etc. to work with, and your files stay in Office format.
I'm not shilling for the day job here. :) I was a Dropbox user until the Skydrive upgrade came out. The editing abilities and bigger free storage sold me, and I haven't lost any capabilities I had with Dropbox.
I'll give it a look. I hope it works better in Opera than Docs does. ;)
Wow, Skydrive is turning me right off. I'm trying to upload some word documents to it, and it either gives me some type of "empty document" error, or uploads never seem to happen, they just sit there for several minutes stuck at "Uploading 0%". Not a great first impression.
Are you working through the browser or just letting the native client app work the sync magic?
Browser. Wanted to try out the web interface before I installed yet another service thingy.
Skydrive wiill be fully integrated into windows 8. Everybody will have it, for free. That's hard to beat.
As for dropbox, I can't think of any feature that would justify a 4x price differential. They will raise their base storage to 5GB and drop their prices, or they will die.
I hope not. I really like DropBox. Just save a file and it appears everywhere else that I work from. I don't know how transparent the other services are yet but if they aren't like that, it'll suck. DropBox requires you to do .. well, absolutely nothing .. it 'just works'.
They are absolutely identical in every way. They have the same little check and refresh icons on files. The google version even has the same popup menu when you rightclick in the notification area. They completely, shamelessly, ripped off dropbox.
Yeah, I noticed that too.
Haha, OK ... will check it out whenever I get my invite then. Thanks!
Well, so far Google Drive certainly crashes a lot more than Dropbox.
It does! On both my home machine and work laptop it's crashed once or twice so far. It also seems to sync a lot more slowly than Dropbox, but maybe that's because it's new and everyone is in a rush to use it.
So far I've seen no compelling reason to switch from Dropbox. And before y'all say cost, I'm willing to pay more for the stability of a more mature platform. ;)
And oh yeah, this seems to be a general problem Skydrive has with Opera. I am so not using another browser just for one service. ;)
Off-topic, why do you subject yourself to Opera? Whatever features it may have, every time I've tried to use it I've hit sites that don't work properly with it in the first few hours of usage.
Sites test against IE, Firefox, Chrome, and sometimes Safari. Opera, far less often, because it's just a tiny percentage of visitors for most websites.
So I'm curious as to what's awesome enough about the browser to make you put up with some sites having issues with it?
I very rarely run into a problem like this with Opera anymore. Maybe 5% of the sites I visit tell me to use another browser, sillyheads.
As for why I "subject" myself to it, I love how it's not a memory hog and needs to be constantly restarted like both Chrome and Firefox. It has extensions now, which makes it more useful. I also am totally in love with its email client. I've been using Opera for years, and I couldn't be happier with it.
Also, Dropbox works wonderfully in it. As does Google Drive (though I like Dropbox's interface better). ;)
I'm using Opera because my install of Firefox has so many extraneous tabs open in it that I was running into RAM issues trying to play games with it up, and it took long enough to close and reopen that that became obnoxious as well. And no, I absolutely positively can't get rid of any of them for any reason whatsoever and would die if I tried, so there.
As for Chrome; it's already open holding my second Gmail login and related stuff (mostly work-related). Thus I still need a multi-tabbed non-IE browser to contain my personal main Gmail and related stuff + general purpose browsing. Opera it is!
Eventually, I'll stop playing games long enough to read my FF backlog. Someday. Probably.
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